Many professions require that the individuals who engage in the profession maintain an up to date knowledge of different aspects of their practice. For example, investment bankers may need to identify current market trends and fund performance, technical researchers need access to the most current research in their field of expertise, and engineering development teams may need access to technical specifications and performance analyses. Each individual obtains information from a wide variety of sources including email, news services, technical forums and web-browsing, among others. The information may accumulate on a daily basis, and it is often difficult for the professional to sort through the accumulated information and prioritize the reading of the information. While various services include mechanisms for indicating to the user that he or she has already read a document, little else has been done to assist the user's document selection process. It would be desirable to identify a method which would assist an individual in identifying which documents in a collection are the highest priority documents given the individuals personal knowledge needs.
Further, users often choose the documents that they read through knowledge of what other users have read. In some cases, a group or team of users may wish to distribute their reading so as to provide broad coverage of a large number of documents. In yet other cases, one user may wish to read what other, influential users have read, so as to be able to anticipate questions from those other, influential users. In these senses, reading takes place in a social context. It is desirable to assist users in making reading choices based on these social factors.